Blacksburg resident Monica Appleby worked for more than a decade on a book about her experiences as a nun in Virginia's coalfields during the 1960s. Beginning Monday, she will lead a three-night discussion of the book, which was recently published by the University Press of Kentucky.

"Mountain Sisters: From Convent to Community in Appalachia" tells the story of the Glenmary sisters, an Ohio-based Catholic order that worked with people in rural Appalachia during America's "war on poverty." The order later decided to split with the church and went on to found a secular community service organization.

Over a 12-year period, Appleby and her Georgia-based co-author Helen Lewis, also a former member of the order, gathered documentation, photographs and interviews from more than a dozen of their former sisters and others. Many of the sisters read and offered advice on the manuscript, Appleby said.

"It was, in a way, community written, community voiced," she said.

Appleby joined the order in 1955 when she was 18. "We were trained like regular sisters, but we didn't do the regular things sisters do. We were noninstitutional," she said.

Rather than running schools, the Glenmary sisters set up missions and worked one-on-one with people across Appalachia. As a member of the order, Appleby worked for many years at a mission in Big Stone Gap.

The order, founded in 1941 to work with people in rural Appalachia, advocated social change, helped with community economic development, established legal aid, staffed health clinics and even followed workers as they migrated to northern cities such as Cincinnati, Appleby said.

But the larger Catholic church objected to the order's unorthodox practices, including their style of dress. "We wore short habits and lived in apartments," Appleby said. Rome cracked down on the order, eventually putting a priest in charge of the sisters. About 45 decided to leave the order en masse in 1967 and went on to found the Federation of Communities in Service, a secular organization that carries on with the original vision of the order.

"People live where they live and get really involved in the community where they live and join with other local people and groups to meet needs in the community," she said.

Appleby served as the first president of the federation, which still meets twice a year to discuss Appalachia's economic and social needs and to worship together. "We've learned how to become a dispersed community, not set apart from others like a religious order," she said.

Since moving to Blacksburg in 1975, Appleby has worked with and helped found several human service agencies in the area, including the Women's Resource Center in Radford and SHARE. But it's all part of the work she set out to do in 1955, she said.

Today Appleby still works with the federation and she directs the New Enterprises Fund, a Christiansburg-based nonprofit that helps low- and moderate-income people save and borrow money to buy homes, start businesses and pay for higher education.